I don’t know about you, but when I do a search on a word like Aspartame, I find the best results always come up first. That’s because Google is a disinterested third party, with nothing but your best interests at heart. And when you read things like Aspartame’s safe and healthy, and try new organic vegan Aspartame, then you can rest easy, knowing Google’s on the ball, and only the best studies are on the table.

And then there’s your friendly neighborhood diet soda. If you were to Google diet soda and weight gain, you might just stop at the top article, so authoritative are the authorities in dismissing the unscrupulous rumor mills that purport to link the two. Did you hear, all those disreputable sites cited one study featuring two disgruntled rats? Yes. Every. Single. One.

And that’s how the industry keeps people away from relevant information. If only it were the only way!

The truth is that all research into diet soda and weight gain doesn’t lead back to one study and a pair of rats. I know this because I kept scrolling and checked out different studies. More convincing research reveals that many times people use diet soda to offset other foods. (Not that you can offset the junk these “dieters” are consuming.) The poor soda drinker, already poisoned by false notions of what constitutes a well-balanced diet, ends up eating junk thinking he’s earned it by drinking a healthy beverage. And that’s how the weight is gained.

Other factors are harder to quantify. Many report strange cravings after drinking the drinks, or the need to eat something sweet to nullify the awful taste left behind by Aspartame, etc. This too can lead to gains.
I can sympathize with people who drink diet soda because of advertising propaganda. What I find hard to understand is how someone can get used to drinking something that tastes so horrible?!

And even though Aspartame’s link to cancer is fairly well established (unless you read Google’s top site recommendations), rational people who can balance a check book and otherwise perform complicated tasks, simply can’t accept that a deadly poison is being sold to them (so briskly) over their friend the Television.

This friend of ours is the prime culprit in the selling of “foods of progress”. Ever since its appearance and the advent of TV dinner life, we’ve been taken down the primrose path regarding ersatz food products: buying into the notion that sugar, butter, cheese and water ought to be improved by us.

But the body was not designed to handle ersatz substances. Our organs, proteins and enzymes were made to assimilate sugar, not Aspartame. So the issue really isn’t can I lose a few pounds by drinking diet soda. It’s will this product end upeventually killing me? Or perhaps there will only be neurotoxic effects. That sounds better, doesn’t it? And then there are the studies: brain tumors have been found in monkeys that ate it; meanwhile mice developed holes in their brains.

Enter Donald Rumsfeld. As Chairman of Searle, the company that owned Aspartame’s patent, he vowed to bombard the skittish FDA (at that time opposed to Aspartame due to its deadly reputation), until he got his pet poison into the food supply. And he succeeded, only later becoming Secretary of Defense. I don’t know about you, but the entire situation makes my skin crawl.

There’s a certain network of vultures that work in tandem to generate profits, no matter what the cost. They understand the power of images and the drives that motivate people. They know how the body works, but realize there’s less money to be made making real food. Slimeballs in advertising display gorgeous models sipping health-poison at the gym, to boost soda sales. Soda giants sell drinks that should be marked with skulls and bones. And who could forget the FDA, which proves to be both polyamorous and impotent at the same time. (That’s a real feat, people.)

Oscar Wilde famously said,

“True friends stab you in the front.”

The truth about diet drinks, modern foods and the enormous apparatus that sells them, is a hard slap in the face. But once the pain fades and the worthless reasons for drinking diet soda dissipate, sanity can set in.

The truth about public diet is largely the opposite of what we’ve been told by the so-called authorities. Opposing them is an admirable network of like-minded people, striving against Scylla and Charybdis. The question of food and drink is a human rights issue. And the saying you are what eat has never been truer than it is today.

Chris Veritas is the author of Wisdom Trilogy and New Poems. You can purchase it here, and read his op-eds here.